More accurate view of customer addresses

Bell eliminates more than 5 million duplicate records

As a premier communications provider, Bell offers multiple services to its clients. Having the ability to know detailed information about a customer is essential to offering the appropriate goods and services. Bell wanted to combine its customer address information with details of Canadian dwellings.

Our experience working with Modern Analytics and SAS greatly exceeded our expectations. The team went beyond simply solving the problem; they gave us the information we needed to improve our business.

Yves Lapierre
Associate Director of the Customer Data Mart

Like many companies, Bell manages customer data in multiple applications. To improve customer service and support initiatives, Bell wanted to gain a unified view of the services already in use at a specific address. It also needed to verify that each address was, in fact, unique and distinct.

To achieve this unified view, the company used a third-party vendor to combine internal customer profiles with multiple external sources to create a master list of Canadian dwellings. However, after examining more than 24 million records from this process, Bell found errors, duplications and variations in the data. Inaccurate and unreliable data hindered the company's ability to offer new services to potential customers.

An in-house solution

Bell wanted a flexible and efficient in-house solution that managed its match rules, so they invested in a SAS® Data Management. In addition, Bell turned to Modern Analytics, a SAS partner and an industry-leading solution provider in data-processing automation, business intelligence and customer analytics.

SAS enables business users to reconcile, cleanse and enrich internal address data, with localization and address enrichment capabilities that offer the ability to create complete and accurate address information for more than 240 countries around the world. In addition, SAS can enrich address data with geographic, demographic or other details.

"Our experience working with Modern Analytics and SAS greatly exceeded our expectations," says Yves Lapierre, Associate Director of Bell's Customer Data Mart. "The team went beyond simply solving the problem; they gave us the information we needed to improve our business. We were expecting a company that could just help us properly deploy the technology, but Modern Analytics helped us understand what was required as well as preparing us for the future."

The results

Modern Analytics helped Bell create a more accurate master list of Canadian dwellings that can now be used for extensive product marketing campaigns. Using the advanced fuzzy-matching capabilities of SAS Data Management, Bell identified and eliminated more than 5 million duplicate records from its databases.

Bell also applied the same de-duplication business rules to monitor the ongoing quality of new and incoming data. With the batch-processing capabilities, the company can now reconcile new address information nightly, ensuring that overall customer data quality remains high.

"SAS provides a robust solution that allowed us to accomplish the tasks related to this project in a timely manner," says Matthias Gruber, Director of Engineering, Modern Analytics. "With its ease of installation, configuration and user interface, the SAS Data Management technology is our preferred choice when timelines are tight and data quality is a key. The smooth integration into the existing architecture clearly illustrates the flexibility of the solution. The knowledge transfer to the Bell team was seamless and facilitated the ultimate success of the project."

"Turning to Modern Analytics and SAS has proven to be a great improvement over outsourcing the process," says Lapierre. "The intuitive SAS solution is helping us get better results at a much lower cost."

Challenge

Gain a unified view of the services already in use at a specific address, verify that each is unique and distinct, offer new services to potential customers.

Solution

Benefits

More accurate master list of dwellings for extensive marketing campaigns.

Found and eliminated 5 million duplicate records.

Reconcile new data nightly to ensure quality remains high.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.